November 16, 2014

Like peanut butter and jelly, cookies and milk, coffee and alcohol can go pretty darn well together. There's plenty of coffee based liqueur out on the market, and Kahlua may be one of the most well known. We came across a bunch of recipes for making your own Kahlua at home, and we thought we'd put our own spin on it.

Many of the recipes we found call for using instant coffee...That'll certainly get you some coffee flavor, but we really want the coffee to shine in our liqueur, so we've adapted the recipe to use cold brew from Cold Bruer. As a starting point, I used the recipe found here at Beanilla.com.

The ingredients are pretty simple...

The recipe we used for making a 400ml batch:

200ml of concentrated cold brew*

200ml of 80 proof Vodka

100g of sugar

1 vanilla bean

Vanilla extract (for the ready to drink version)

It was a little tricky figuring out how much cold brew we we should use for the recipe, but after a few test batches, I ended up making a cold brew that was twice as concentrated as how we normally brew it.

To do this, we used 60g of Temple Ethiopia Boke (a delicious coffee for cold brew) and 350 ml of water (half the amount we usually use to make it concentrated). We set the drip rate to about 1 drip per 1.5 seconds, and let it finish over night.

The vanilla beans can be a little tricky to find locally, but they can easily be purchased online at Beanilla.

The next steps are pretty simple...

2 Weeks!?!?

That's an awfully long time to wait... but there's a trick you can use to make it drinkable right away. Substitute 1 tsp of vanilla extract for the vanilla bean. When testing the recipes, we substituted vanilla extract. From what I've read, the vanilla bean infusion over a couple weeks will offer better flavor, and It'll also give the vodka some time to mellow out for a smoother taste. Remove the vanilla bean once you've got the right amount of vanilla taste.

Tips for experimenting

For the above recipe, I only used 2/3 of the sugar that the original recipe called for since our cold brew is already pretty sweet. On our next batch, I may even use less sugar. Keep in mind you can always add more sugar to reach your preferred level of sweetness. You can also play around with the concentration levels of the coffee to ensure that the desired amount of coffee flavor comes through.